Elizabeth Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton

I was separated from Elizabeth Taylor by a large round, marble
bathtub half filled with tepid water, the once-abundant, luxurious
bubbles now as flat as day-old champagne. The atmosphere around the two
of us in the ornately tiled bathroom was tense and hushed. There was a
feeling in the air that something uncontrollable might happen at any
moment.

Elizabeth had a drink in one hand, and although outwardly she
appeared calm, her violet eyes were flashing impatiently. I smiled in
her direction, wanting to comfort her, to know her better. She was
standing alone in a soft shimmering pool of light and was dressed only
in a loose-fitting terrycloth robe and a towel wrapped around her head
as if it were a turban. She was incredibly and impossibly beautiful, so
perfect and flawless that every time I looked at her, I had to look
again, not believing my own eyes.

For two hours, the technicians on the set of Secret Ceremony had been
trying to fix the leak in the bathtub so that the scene with Elizabeth
and Mia Farrow bathing together could continue. Mia had fled to her
dressing room in boredom. Miss Taylor, as everyone within earshot
addressed her, was nervous about the incestuous and Lesbian overtones to
the scene and was hovering nervously on the sidelines, anxious to finish
filming.

I was young and I
was fearless. I hadn’t yet learned that there are certain boundaries in
life that one does not cross without first being asked. I had succeeded
so far by instinctively doing what felt right. I was a writer. I figured
that gave me the freedom to go where mere mortals often feared to tread.

I moved purposefully to the woman in the terrycloth robe, bowed slightly
from the waist as if it were somehow expected of me, and introduced
myself.

“I’m writing a story on Joseph Losey for The Daily Telegraph Magazine.” I said quietly, so that only she could hear me.

“You’ll forgive me for saying this,” I continued, knowing as I spoke
that what I was about to say could be taken the wrong way, “but you
remind me of my mother…”

She continued to look at me, a smile forming on her face.

“…when she was much younger, of course.”

Many things may be said about Elizabeth Taylor. A lack of composure is
not one of them.

Her eyes flashed seductively. Time seemed to freeze. Even among all the
other people on the set, I was somehow alone with Elizabeth Taylor.

“You must have a very beautiful mother,” she replied finally, smiling
for an instant like the Mona Lisa. “You’re a very lucky young man.”

She was so sincere. I couldn’t help but laugh.

It was at that
precise moment that I became a close, personal friend of Elizabeth
Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton. It was a friendship that would
endure until the disparity between fame and anonymity eventually took
its toll.

It was also the exact moment that two burly men appeared from
nowhere, gently lifted me by the elbows and moved me three feet away
from Miss Taylor.

“It’s alright Dick,” Miss Taylor said to the handsome, grey-haired man
who was obviously the leader of the pack. “He was just telling me that I
reminded him of his mother.”

Dick Hanley, Miss Taylor’s secretary, confidant, father figure and
close, personal friend since her days as a contract player with MGM,
looked at me with a mixture of awe and disbelief.

“No one,” he hissed, half under his breath, but audible enough to be
heard by everyone on the set, “approaches Miss Taylor without asking me
first.”

Miss Taylor continued to smile. The two men on either side of me relaxed
their grip.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Dick Hanley. “I wanted to ask Miss Taylor
about Joseph Losey for the article I’m writing, but when I got close to
her, I…”

My voice trailed off.

“You needn’t explain,” Miss Taylor said breezily. “I have that effect on
just about everyone.”

She put her arm in mine and guided me away from the set. “Now come
back to my dressing room and we’ll talk all day about Joe if you want
to. And I’m just dying to hear more about that mother of yours.”

It was 1967 and Elizabeth Taylor was in London starring with Mia
Farrow and Robert Mitchum in the film Secret Ceremony, a darkly
obscure movie directed by Joseph Losey, the American director that had
been blacklisted during the McCarthy Era.

Only the year before, Losey had directed Elizabeth and Richard Burton
in Boom! (“Thud,” one reviewer wrote), the film adaptation of
Tennessee Williams’ The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. She
and Losey were good, if not close friends.

I had just turned 23, but I still looked like a teenager, a blessing
and a curse. Elizabeth was 35. She was at the peak of her beauty
and fame. Happily married to Richard Burton (still for the first time),
she was the toast of London, and although Secret Ceremony would go down
in film annals as one of her more forgettable films, that prospect did
not faze her in the least. After Le Scandale of Cleopatra, she was the
biggest box office draw in the world and she was getting paid a million
dollars to star in Losey’s latest film, the first actress or actor to
ever reach that financial pinnacle. Her popularity, on screen and off,
was at an all-time, unheard-of high.

Her dressing room at Elstree Studios was lavish. Actually, three
dressing rooms had been knocked into one huge suite for her. The sitting
room, dressing room, bedroom and kitchen were all covered with the same
vine-and-trellis wallpaper that Miss Taylor had personally selected. Dick Hanley (who was always referred to by his full name in order to
avoid confusion with Richard Burton) busied himself in the kitchen,
finishing up the homemade chili he had started preparing earlier that
day. Chili, as I was soon to learn, was one of Miss Taylor’s favorite
foods. Often, she had it flown in from Chasen’s in Beverly Hills on a
private jet.

Dick was a distinguished man in his early sixties. Thin, suave,
sophisticated and protective, he looked after Miss Taylor with an
obsessive, kindly zeal. In addition to attending to his employer,
arguably the most famous movie star in the world, it was obvious that he
loved and adored her, and that feeling was returned with much bantering
and affection. His lover, John Lee, however, was a rather portly old
queen with the gruff disposition of an aging gossip columnist. He
was ostensibly Miss Taylor’s official press agent, but in reality the
title had been bestowed upon him only to give him a raison d’être in the
Taylor entourage. I would get to know these men well and would come to
care for both of them for the same reason. They absolutely idolized
Elizabeth.

That afternoon, there was nothing but good humor in the rarified air
of the dressing room. Dick served his famous chili, Dom Perignon was
consumed in great quantities by everyone except Miss Taylor, who drank
Jack Daniels with a splash on the rocks, and the afternoon floated by
without even a mention of Joseph Losey, who was presumably somewhere on
the set trying to get that damn bathtub fixed and filled with bubbles
befitting his queen.

As professionally aggressive as I was and as socially blasé as I
appeared to be, I was vaguely aware that I was moving in circles that
most people would never have a chance to even glimpse. I knew
instinctively that I would never be one of these people, that it was
unlikely that I would ever achieve the same level of fame and wealth,
but that didn’t stop me from enjoying the experience. The moment was all
that mattered. How long it lasted was not important.

I savored the chili and the champagne, and at the end of the day, I
told Elizabeth (I never called her Miss Taylor again) that my mother
once said that she was the only movie star she would walk across the
street to see in person. Coming from the young American expatriate from
Santa Barbara, Elizabeth said she thought it was the sweetest compliment
she had ever received.

If Elizabeth and I came from two different worlds, we bonded because
of that difference.

In Elizabeth’s case, she was true movie star royalty. At one
point in our conversation, when we were talking about our respective
childhoods, she told me that she could not remember when she wasn’t
famous. I couldn’t begin to imagine what that would be like. To her fans
(to me), her lifestyle was the epitome of glamour. She palled around
with queens and kings, she went to parties all over the world, she wore
different diamonds every evening, and she had the most beautifully
violet eyes that anyone had ever seen.

And, as is often the case with people who are constantly in the
public eye, Elizabeth was exactly the same offstage as she was in front
of the cameras. When the director yelled “Cut!” and the film
stopped rolling, her own camera began to whirr and her own spotlight
found her and placed her in the middle of the stage. And she knew it. She knew that her private life was as much a role as the characters she
portrayed on film. She tiptoed through her life in a series of
award-winning roles, and befriending the young American reporter who
said she reminded him of his mother was yet one more role for her to
embrace.

I, on the other hand, was set apart from the masses in an entirely
different manner. Although I was intelligent, ambitious and rather
naively sophisticated, those qualities in themselves did not set me
apart from the others. What people noticed about me most was that I
seemed desperately interested in what they had to say, and because I was
a writer and was constantly asking questions, I gave the impression - and an accurate one - that I cared very much for that person.
Even though they might be complete strangers. I had the ability to
pigeonhole my feelings, so that I could be a different person to
different people. Instead of this tearing me apart, it allowed me
to play innumerable roles, both in public and in private.
That day I was playing the role of a reporter. I was also playing the
part of an adoring fan. And I was also playing the part of newly found
confidant. The result was that I was a young man who people wanted to
confide in. It didn’t matter if it were the taxi driver or Elizabeth
Taylor, people told me things when they first met me that they would
never dream of telling anyone else.

The bathtub was not fixed that day. Instead, Elizabeth entertained me,
first with interesting, amusing stories, then with sillier stories as
the Jack Daniels worked its magic and it became apparent that there
would be no more filming that afternoon. Joseph Losey, looking wan and overworked, made a brief appearance in the
dressing room. He was cordial, but he could not mask his feelings that
he was working and Elizabeth was not. He said he had seen the rushes
from the day before in which Elizabeth was lying in bed, writhing in her
sleep.

“Unfortunately,” Losey confided to all of us, “your breasts look like
two large puppies fighting with each other under a blanket.”

There was a brief, awkward silence before Elizabeth laughed, then I
joined in as did the others. Elizabeth stood up and put her hand
on her hip. “That Liz Taylor! What are we going to do with her?”

Losey said he would reshoot the scene the next day, using another
angle that would be more flattering to Elizabeth’s amble bosom. I
thought Losey’s comment was not in very good taste, but of course I said
nothing. Even by that time, my loyalty to Elizabeth was already so
strong that I resented anyone criticizing her. Although my friendship
would continue with Losey for many years, I would always remember the
remark he made about Elizabeth’s breasts. His attitude – his lack
of respect – was unforgivable.

After Losey was gone, the smile left Elizabeth’s face. “I told him that
before we shot the scene.”

It was time to leave the studio. I had taken the train down from
London. Elizabeth insisted that I accompany her back to the Dorchester
in her new white Rolls Royce, a gift from producer John Heyman. In
addition to producing Secret Ceremony, he had also produced Boom! and
had given Elizabeth the Rolls as a present for finishing the picture on
time. At a million dollars a film, giving Elizabeth, who was
chronically late and generally did not finish a film on time, a Rolls
Royce was a lot less expensive than if she had gone even one day over
schedule. Dick Hanley and John Lee took their own blue Rolls back
to the hotel, while Gaston, the chauffeur, drove Elizabeth and me with
the deliberateness of a man who had the world’s most precious cargo in
the back seat.

Finally Elizabeth rapped on the window and shouted, “Gaston, would
you step on it, please! I’m dying to see Richard!”

When the Burtons stayed in London, they stayed in the penthouse suite of
the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane. At that time, it was one of the
most luxurious hotels in the the world, catering to both old and new
money, European aristocracy and glitzy American movie stars.
Situated across from Hyde Park, the Burtons’ suite had a spectacular
view north towards Marble Arch and south towards Mayfair.
Buckingham Palace was just a stone’s throw away.

I stood with a drink in my hand on the balcony overlooking the park.
Although I was drinking Scotch, I was also drinking in the headiness of
the moment, sipping Chivas Regal on the balcony of Elizabeth’s suite
while she changed clothes in the bedroom. I wondered idly if the
two queens, both named Elizabeth, ever came out onto their balconies at
the same time and waved to each other. The thought of it brought a smile
to my lips.

While Elizabeth changed – assisted by her hairdresser, her maid and
the wardrobe mistress from the film – I assessed my situation. If
I had chosen, this could have been an opportunistic moment. I could have
used it to further my career as a writer, or even as an actor, something
I hadn’t even discussed with Elizabeth yet. I could have used this
opportunity to further my social ambitions, to help guide my lifestyle
to new and higher ground. In fact, I could have exploited this trust,
this closeness in a number of calculated ways. A few hours before, I had
been merely a fan. Now I had been promoted to friendly
acquaintance. Perhaps I was out of my league, but I was too young and
too naive to really understand what that meant. I knew Elizabeth
genuinely liked me. As she said in the back of the white Rolls Royce,
anyone who thinks his mother is as beautiful as Elizabeth Taylor can’t
be all bad.

The penthouse of the Dorchester, when occupied by less godlike
inhabitants, was a rather pompous, formal suite of rooms. It still had
some of that quality, but because the Burtons stayed there so often, the
hotel had decorated the suite to Elizabeth’s specifications before she
arrived. Draperies were replaced, furniture was recovered and table
lamps were added to create a softer, more home-like feeling. The effect
was that of coziness and warmth. I would always remember the feeling
of that room, although the details would soon be lost to memory.
It was the feeling that very rich, very famous people lived here.
It was different from anything I had ever known.

The sitting room was abuzz with activity when I came in from the
balcony. There were three blond young men from room service setting out
an impressive array of hors d’oeuvres — shrimp cold cuts, crab, cheese,
meatballs, caviar. Dick and John arrived, both freshly dressed
in expensive, perfectly pressed suits. Dick was clearly in charge,
supervising the arrangement of the food, checking on how the bar was
being set up in one corner of the room, making small talk with the
servers, easing their nervousness at being in the Burton suite.
Elizabeth, Dick told me, was always late, yet he always fretted when she
was.

Everyone was waiting for Richard Burton to arrive. He was filming
Laughter in the Dark and it was not going well. The English papers
were full of stories about the feuds between him and director Tony
Richardson. Dick Hanley called the studio to see when Richard would be
finished shooting. He was told that he had already left and was on his
way back to the hotel.

Without Elizabeth in the sitting room, the suite was an empty stage
waiting for the curtain to go up. Everything was in place, but Act I had
not yet begun. I wondered briefly if Elizabeth and Richard made this
much of a production every evening. Well of course they did.
What seemed like a production to me was nothing more than a way of life
to them.

The phone rang. Dick Hanley answered it and said, “Yes, yes, let them up.” He screened all incoming calls and decided the fate of all would-be
visitors. “No one comes up here,” he said to me in the same voice he
first used when he greeted me at the studio, “without my permission.
And I mean no one. Not even Elizabeth’s mother.”

John opened the door to the suite and greeted two women. The first was
Norma Heyman, a slightly thinner, coarser version of Elizabeth herself.
She was dressed in a leather maxi-skirt, a blouse made from Moroccan
scarves and an abundance of gold jewelry on her hands and around her
neck. The other woman, dark and petite and similar in appearance to
Norma, was introduced to me rather formally as Elizabeth, Princess of
Yugoslavia. She did not look like I thought a princess should look, but
that could have been because she hadn’t seen the inside of a palace in
years. She was living, as they say, in exile. She was pretty
and vacant and would achieve notoriety years later as Richard’s mistress
between his marriages to Elizabeth. And many years after that, she
would become known to another generation as the mother of Catherine Oxenberg, the actress who played - of all things - a princess on the
prime-time soap opera Dynasty.

After shaking the princess’ offered hand, I thought, a princess and a
queen in one room. Now this should be something to write home
about.

Dick Hanley mixed cocktails, the blonde young men served hors d’oeuvres.

Norma told me that she was Elizabeth’s best friend in the whole world.
“We do everything together,” she proclaimed. From someone else, the
statement might have seemed boastful. From Norma, it sounded
sincere, or at the very least, that she believed it herself. “Elizabeth
goes through friends very fast,” she continued. “Very fast indeed. Only
a few of us manage to survive. Everyone seems to want something from
her. I’m sure you know what I mean, don’t you?” She sighed. “So when did
you meet her?”

Princess Elizabeth looked at me anxiously as
I answered. “I met her this afternoon at the studio.”

Norma suppressed a giggle. “This afternoon? At the
studio?
My goodness, you are new to all this, aren’t you?”

Princess Elizabeth leaned forward. “That’s how I met her, too.
At the studio.”

“Well, isn’t this cozy?” Norma said to me, giving me a winning
smile. “I’m the only one who’s an actress and I did not meet her at the
studio.”

"You were an actress,” Princess Elizabeth said.

“How did youmeet her?” I asked Norma.

“I really can’t remember. I think it was at a party. Yes, that’s it. I
met her through John. John is my husband. He produced two of Elizabeth’s
films.”

“Really?”

“I’d rather not discuss it,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “I find
talking about film rather boring.”

“Especially talking about
the ones John made,” Princess Elizabeth added.

At that moment, Elizabeth Taylor, the most beautiful movie star in the
world, appeared magically at the door of the bedroom. She was
dressed in a light yellow, swirling caftan, her hair in gentle ringlets
around her flawless face. The stage was now obviously set, for within
seconds of her entrance, Richard Burton burst through the front door.
He was drunk and on the verge of being charmingly disorderly.

Elizabeth flew into his arms, playing Juliette to his Romeo. It was
obvious to me - and to everyone else in the room- that they were very
much in love.

Breaking away reluctantly from their embrace, the two of them began
to dart around the room. They were constantly in motion. She
brought him a
cocktail. He took it from her, graciously raising it in a silent toast
to his beloved. She whispered something in his ear; he listened
attentively, then moved swiftly to the writing desk to look briefly at
his messages. They were engaged in an exaggerated mating ritual, a
parry and thrust that was somewhere between a dance and a duel.

Elizabeth introduced me. Richard’s eyes were ablaze. He did not spare
me the courtesy of unfamiliarity. After staring at me for a long moment,
he demanded of Elizabeth, “Where did you find him?”

Elizabeth’s voice was soothing. She stroked Richard’s brow. “At the
studio, dear.” She winked at me. “He told me that I reminded him of his
mother.”

“Bloody hell!” Richard bellowed (and I mean bellowed!), making a
sound that could surely be heard by the other Elizabeth just up the
street. “You brought him here after he told you that his mother
looked like a fat tart of a movie star!”

Elizabeth ran to him again, putting her arm around the man she loved.
“Now luv, let’s show our guests a good time tonight, shall we? We don’t
want them to think that we are uncivilized.” She said the word as if it
were the worst insult she could imagine.

Emotional outbursts always caught me off guard. I was not really very
good at hiding my embarrassment. I looked at Norma, then at Princess
Elizabeth. Both of them seemed to be oblivious to what was taking place. They had seen it before and they knew - or thought they knew - that it
was a game. Richard and Elizabeth were at it again, getting ready
to resurrect the more predictable qualities of George and Martha at a
moment’s notice.

Elizabeth turned on the portable radio on the table next to the sofa.
All she got was static. She handed the small radio to me and said, “Be a
dear, will you, and find us some soothing music.”

I couldn’t get any station very clearly. Richard grabbed the radio
away from me. “Here, you need to take it out on the balcony so you can
get better reception.” He moved unsteadily towards the outside patio,
twisted the knob a few times but still got nothing but static.

“Bloody fucking radio!” he roared at Elizabeth. He turned away from
her and hurled it off the balcony. Elizabeth rushed to the edge.

“You could kill someone!” She screamed. “If it landed on somebody’s
head, you could kill them!”

“Serve them bloody well right!”

Elizabeth glared at him. He glared back. Suddenly the tension in
the room disappeared as quickly and as inexplicably as it had begun. Richard turned towards me, shrugged away the mantle of his discontent
and shook my hand with a fine, sincere grip.

“Glad to meet you, old boy,” he boomed. “You were ringside at the
fight of the night and you didn’t even flinch. You’ll fit in nicely with
this group.”

I smiled back at him, trying to see in his eyes what he really
thought of me. Everything he did and said seemed purposeful and
rehearsed. His most idle comment was profound because of that voice,
that incredible, omnipotent voice. His voice was to language what
Elizabeth’s eyes were to beauty: They were the standards by which
everything else would be measured.

Of course Elizabeth knew this. She was never one to underestimate her
worth. Often, when she and Richard would quarrel, when she would begin
to lose the verbal battle, she would become silent and coquettish,
fighting the battle with the intensity of her beauty. She was
doing that now, fluttering her eyes ever so slightly as Richard
dominated the room with his voice. It was a war of voices and eyes, and
each of them knew they possessed the winning weapon. If Elizabeth
was the embodiment of feminine guile, Richard was the embodiment of man
personified as a god. They were both larger than life. Theirs was a
world of grandness and elegance, of fantasy and play. Their passion for
each other was so intense it consumed all other facets of their
personalities.

When Richard turned away for a moment to fix himself another drink,
Elizabeth said, “I can’t call him Dick. It excites me too much.” She
would say that again and again, even years later after he died. I
believed her. Her breathlessness in his presence was staggering.

Richard grabbed my arm and pulled me out onto the balcony. He had his
drink in one hand and a bottle of Chivas Regal in the other. He poured
me a drink, demanded I down it, then poured me another. He talked
about rugby for a few minutes, then turned the conversation to writing.

“I try to write. All the time. I try to write important things, but I
finally give up. I admire writers. Even reporters. You create something
from nothing. I know how hard it is.” Then he talked about rugby again. He stopped in midsentence and went back into the suite. I followed and
had another drink.

Norma, Princess Elizabeth and I left soon after. We all knew it was
time to go. Richard and Elizabeth needed time to themselves. As we left,
Richard proclaimed to the multitude, “I like you, young man. Your
mother - tart though she might be - did a fine job of raising you.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow, won’t I?” Elizabeth commanded as I was
leaving. “Come to the studio for lunch.”

I went out into the cold London night. I wanted to walk, to come back
to reality for a while. Having spent an evening with Elizabeth Taylor
and Richard Burton, I felt like an alien on a strange and unexplored
planet. I didn’t know it then but that night marked the beginning
of a social life in London that would change my perspective about life
forever.